I-Corps: Scalable Artificial Intelligence-Supported Flood Resilience Assessment

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a scalable, flood resilience software framework to provide fast, accurate, and valid flood damage prediction under various flooding scenarios and at multiple geographic scales. The services provided by the proposed cyberinfrastructure platform may provide scalable, dynamic, intelligent, building-level flood resilience assessment. The proposed technology significantly reduces the workload of measuring house-level lowest floor elevation and largely facilitates community-level flood damage assessment by providing services of on-the-fly damage predictions with user-defined scenarios. One benefit of the successful deployment of the proposed technology may be to help communities quickly explore the spatial distribution of flood risks and test how flood events with varying intensities affect individual houses as well as the whole community. Such knowledge is expected to further benefit government officials, first responders, and resource allocators. The knowledge will also help promote flood awareness at the regional and national levels.This I-Corps project is based on the development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-supported geospatial cyberinfrastructure platform for flood damage prediction. Existing community-level flood resilience and adaptation are often investigated in an unscalable manner, making the investigation workflow community-specific with low transferability to other communities or to large geographical scales. In comparison, the proposed technology achieves accurate, fast, and low-cost flood resilience assessment by 1) deriving fine-grained, building-level flood exposure using United States national building footprints and cross-referenced floodplain products, 2) proposing a scalable workflow of lowest floor elevation retrieval, taking advantage of street view images, 3) developing a flood damage simulation paradigm incorporating building characteristics and simulated flood intensity, and 4) designing an online portal for scalable flood resilience assessment, with the capability of interactive updates, flood scenario selection, location queries, and report generation. The proposed AI-supported cyberinfrastructure and flood damage simulation framework are expected to renovate and transform large-scale flood damage assessment and flood situational awareness communication.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.